Kam
Wall of text crits you for 600
so I've got this unfortunate habit where I can get pulled into arguments on things I don't like and disagree with, but don't spent much time talking about the things that I do like. This has probably given some of you the impression that I hate this game and exist on these forums solely to bash on it, and after looking over my own post history, I wouldn't blame you. So here it is: my complete thoughts on this game
Overall grade 7/10
Bear in mind, this isn't the IGN scale where 9 is acceptable and anything 8 and below is ****. This is a good game, and I absolutely would recommend it to people looking for a good brawler. It's fun, it's got replay value, unlocking things is satisfying and provides incentive, just play the game. Let's break it down by category.
Gameplay 8/10
The good:
Old dante's kit was becoming very bloated, and was characteristic of what happens when you just continue to layer things on top of what was already there without shifting things around to make room for it. Most of his style abilities could have easily been rolled into standard input (which they attemped with nero, somewhat successfully) and overall a lot of stuff just didn't need to be there. It was badly in need of slimming down. The new kit is much more accessible, and I'm personally a huge fan of dialing combos by switching between attacks. If you look at a lot of older DMC combo videos, only single power-hit moves are really used. For example, you only ever see people JCing agni and rudra's air slash for massive damage, but there's no real reason to use the same weapon's ground based combos if you know the alternative. In DmC ground combos are worth carrying out, and the addition of air dialed combos was a good move.
The bad:
Most DMC games had a really poorly designed enemy type that limited combo potential well beyond the acceptable point of "it's a challenge" and DmC is no exception with color coded red and blue enemies. Boss fights felt epic and cinematic, but provided little challenge. The game also places slightly too much emphasis on air combat. Believe it or not, average play of DMC involved a lot of time on the ground; the ground combat felt good and worked well enough. In high level combo videos people spend all day in the air because it was hard to do and extremely powerful, not because it was the most fun. As an analogy, it would be like if super smash bros was rebooted and the designer, after watching high level tournament videos, decided to add in a wave dashing button, where all attacks either triggered, led into, or immediately followed a wave dash.
While accessible, the game's skill ceiling is much lower. Mastering DMC4 dante took an absurd amount of mastery, but doing so turned you into an unstoppable, unkillable murder machine. It didn't look that visually impressive though. The correct solution would have been to make new dante more accessible, but preserve that insane top end skill, and make super high level play look as good as regular play. Compared to DMC3 and 4, the gap between high and low level play is much smaller than it used to be.
A smaller point of contention: DmC's strong point was supposed to be emphasizing what worked in DMC, and cutting out the bad. SO WHY IN THE **** is platforming such a huge part of DmC? Also, finding a secret area that you are incapable of accessing because it requires an item acquired later in the game is a ****ty design choice. There was a podcast where this design was called "similar to metroidvanias". I disagree.
Music 7/10
The good:
Here's what I remember most of DMC3 and DMC4
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND SO HAVE....." [fight ends]
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND SO HAVE I. YOU....." [fight ends]
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND....." [fight ends]
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND SO ....." [fight ends]
only ever hearing the first 30 seconds of the only two creep fighting songs in the game got ****ing old, and the way they gracelessly cut the music out and restarted it every time you encountered another enemy was awful. In DmC the music starts and stops much more smoothly, there is a greater variety of music, and you don't have the same problem of repeating intros to repetitive music like the older games all did.
The bad:
I despise dubstep, so this might carry a little bias. While classic DMC had mediocre music for killing minions, its boss fights had excellent music. Ranging from rock tracks for "less important" boss fights, to the freaking epic music like the tracks associated with vergil and nelo angelo. By contrast, the dubstep boss tracks are generic wub fests. None of the songs are iconic or memorable, and if anything it feels more like they never even bothered to make music for boss fights and chose instead to just recycle minion fight music that wasn't being used.
(fun fact: a mix of nelo angelo's theme plays the first time you encounter the artificial armor demons in DMC4. If you read their bio, the armor demons are called "bianco angelo" were constructed out of the fragments of vergil after his death as nelo angelo).
Story 3/10
The good:
we no longer have to read novels, manga, and comb the word-dense in game encyclopedia for the backstory.
The bad:
The story is heavily plagiarized, dante has been rebooted as a generic angsty teen (in what I suspect is a shameless marketing ploy to appeal to angsty teens), vergil has lost what little depth he had before, and the dante/vergil dynamic was pretty weak. In DMC3, you spent the whole game fighting vergil. After killing dante once and making an almost-successful second attempt, that brief, shining moment of cooperation was all the more dramatic because of how unexpected it was, and it hurt more when that moment ended and they went back to killing each other. In DmC you spent the whole game doing vergil's bidding, and vergil's true nature (and how little dante approved of it) was so heavily foreshadowed throughout the game that even those new to DMC with no knowledge of DMC3's story were already expecting it. The betrayal scene itself was pretty phoned in too.
Luckily I'm not playing this game for the story (for a brawler, story is just to add flavor, not the main event) so the story score was not weighted very much in my final score.
Art and visuals 9/10
The good:
limbo looks fantastic, the "sealing of doors" is much more interesting than the generic red swirl that used to cover them (a remnant of DMC1 that was preserved for too long) and some levels have some really incredible visual themes. The raptor news network logo, limbo in lilith's club, and the upside down bridge are some of my all time favorites.
The bad:
I dunno... too much blue and orange? It's overused because it works though, so can I even really fault them for that? The limbo ambient swirl got a bit overused though; there's really only so many times you can see a building explode outward and swirl its pieces into a platforming segment before the novelty wears thin.
Overall grade 7/10
Bear in mind, this isn't the IGN scale where 9 is acceptable and anything 8 and below is ****. This is a good game, and I absolutely would recommend it to people looking for a good brawler. It's fun, it's got replay value, unlocking things is satisfying and provides incentive, just play the game. Let's break it down by category.
Gameplay 8/10
The good:
Old dante's kit was becoming very bloated, and was characteristic of what happens when you just continue to layer things on top of what was already there without shifting things around to make room for it. Most of his style abilities could have easily been rolled into standard input (which they attemped with nero, somewhat successfully) and overall a lot of stuff just didn't need to be there. It was badly in need of slimming down. The new kit is much more accessible, and I'm personally a huge fan of dialing combos by switching between attacks. If you look at a lot of older DMC combo videos, only single power-hit moves are really used. For example, you only ever see people JCing agni and rudra's air slash for massive damage, but there's no real reason to use the same weapon's ground based combos if you know the alternative. In DmC ground combos are worth carrying out, and the addition of air dialed combos was a good move.
The bad:
Most DMC games had a really poorly designed enemy type that limited combo potential well beyond the acceptable point of "it's a challenge" and DmC is no exception with color coded red and blue enemies. Boss fights felt epic and cinematic, but provided little challenge. The game also places slightly too much emphasis on air combat. Believe it or not, average play of DMC involved a lot of time on the ground; the ground combat felt good and worked well enough. In high level combo videos people spend all day in the air because it was hard to do and extremely powerful, not because it was the most fun. As an analogy, it would be like if super smash bros was rebooted and the designer, after watching high level tournament videos, decided to add in a wave dashing button, where all attacks either triggered, led into, or immediately followed a wave dash.
While accessible, the game's skill ceiling is much lower. Mastering DMC4 dante took an absurd amount of mastery, but doing so turned you into an unstoppable, unkillable murder machine. It didn't look that visually impressive though. The correct solution would have been to make new dante more accessible, but preserve that insane top end skill, and make super high level play look as good as regular play. Compared to DMC3 and 4, the gap between high and low level play is much smaller than it used to be.
A smaller point of contention: DmC's strong point was supposed to be emphasizing what worked in DMC, and cutting out the bad. SO WHY IN THE **** is platforming such a huge part of DmC? Also, finding a secret area that you are incapable of accessing because it requires an item acquired later in the game is a ****ty design choice. There was a podcast where this design was called "similar to metroidvanias". I disagree.
Music 7/10
The good:
Here's what I remember most of DMC3 and DMC4
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND SO HAVE....." [fight ends]
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND SO HAVE I. YOU....." [fight ends]
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND....." [fight ends]
[fight begins] *guitar solo* "THE TIME HAS COME AND SO ....." [fight ends]
only ever hearing the first 30 seconds of the only two creep fighting songs in the game got ****ing old, and the way they gracelessly cut the music out and restarted it every time you encountered another enemy was awful. In DmC the music starts and stops much more smoothly, there is a greater variety of music, and you don't have the same problem of repeating intros to repetitive music like the older games all did.
The bad:
I despise dubstep, so this might carry a little bias. While classic DMC had mediocre music for killing minions, its boss fights had excellent music. Ranging from rock tracks for "less important" boss fights, to the freaking epic music like the tracks associated with vergil and nelo angelo. By contrast, the dubstep boss tracks are generic wub fests. None of the songs are iconic or memorable, and if anything it feels more like they never even bothered to make music for boss fights and chose instead to just recycle minion fight music that wasn't being used.
(fun fact: a mix of nelo angelo's theme plays the first time you encounter the artificial armor demons in DMC4. If you read their bio, the armor demons are called "bianco angelo" were constructed out of the fragments of vergil after his death as nelo angelo).
Story 3/10
The good:
we no longer have to read novels, manga, and comb the word-dense in game encyclopedia for the backstory.
The bad:
The story is heavily plagiarized, dante has been rebooted as a generic angsty teen (in what I suspect is a shameless marketing ploy to appeal to angsty teens), vergil has lost what little depth he had before, and the dante/vergil dynamic was pretty weak. In DMC3, you spent the whole game fighting vergil. After killing dante once and making an almost-successful second attempt, that brief, shining moment of cooperation was all the more dramatic because of how unexpected it was, and it hurt more when that moment ended and they went back to killing each other. In DmC you spent the whole game doing vergil's bidding, and vergil's true nature (and how little dante approved of it) was so heavily foreshadowed throughout the game that even those new to DMC with no knowledge of DMC3's story were already expecting it. The betrayal scene itself was pretty phoned in too.
Luckily I'm not playing this game for the story (for a brawler, story is just to add flavor, not the main event) so the story score was not weighted very much in my final score.
Art and visuals 9/10
The good:
limbo looks fantastic, the "sealing of doors" is much more interesting than the generic red swirl that used to cover them (a remnant of DMC1 that was preserved for too long) and some levels have some really incredible visual themes. The raptor news network logo, limbo in lilith's club, and the upside down bridge are some of my all time favorites.
The bad:
I dunno... too much blue and orange? It's overused because it works though, so can I even really fault them for that? The limbo ambient swirl got a bit overused though; there's really only so many times you can see a building explode outward and swirl its pieces into a platforming segment before the novelty wears thin.
